Unixica.com

A Nice, Viral Ad

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 23:02:25 -0800

I really liked this ad. It's a bit old, but very interesting:

I can start talking about why I like it, but then you'll know once you see. That's why it's viral!!

iPhone App Store

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 10:16:23 -0800

The iPhone App Store has arrived. It requires iTunes 7.7, and the interface, while a lot is left to be desired, is very simple and easy -- a breakthrough in mobile applications industry. You buy apps just the way you buy songs. People will get it. One click, and it's downloaded to your iTunes. Sync your phone, and you're set to go.

Currently there are 27 pages of applications currently available. A huge number of apps are games - not my forte so I can't really talk about their quality. Also a lot of books are listed as applications, and a bunch of language tools (translations, phrasebook, etc). And then there's a host of various types of Applications. "135 of these apps are free, while the remaining 417 range in price from $0.99 to $69.99, with the vast majority ranging between $0.99 and $9.99."

Read more at TechCrunch's iPhone App Store Has Launched (Updated).

I browsed through the apps and aside from a couple of location-based applications such as Loopt and Whrrl which we already knew about I can't say I saw anything that would really catch my attention - but hey, this is the first day this thing is live. Think of PCs before word processors. There will be a storm coming.

Yahoo! Opening Up Search With BOSS

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:57:12 -0800

Yahoo! has made a game changing move in the search space -- opening its core search technology as APIs to any developer who wants to use it: "BOSS allows developers to submit queries (and their associated parameters) via an API to retrieve up to 50 web, image, news, or spelling results in XML or JSON format at a time."

The API is free with unlimited access. Developers will agree to show Yahoo! ads along with the results. Read the full article at Yahoo Radically Opens Web Search With BOSS.

Startups: Perfecting Your Pitch

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 22:25:58 -0800

I have seen a lot of material on how to prepare a VC pitch, and based on VC meetings I have been to I can tell you that in general this article covers a lot of good points. Notice that it's B2B, so a consumer play pitch would be a little bit different (specially more on marketing and go to market strategy is needed). Also in general the article tends to assume it's not a seed round:

"When it comes to presentation, it goes without saying that the best pitches:

Tell your audience what you're doing, why the market will be big, and why you will win.
Provide an imperative and a sense of urgency - they answer the questions "Why now?" and "What's changed?"
Provide real insight - into the market, customer pain, or a unique approach.
Hook the investor - with compelling customers or user numbers (unless it's a seed stage deal - even then, potential numbers or customers are helpful).
Are delivered with knowledge, passion, and conviction by the entrepreneur."

Read the full article at Tech, Startups, Capital, Ideas. » Perfecting Your Pitch.

Economics and POW Camp

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 11:17:31 -0800

This is a classic paper, published more than 50 years ago. It compares the economics of out society with what happens in a Prisoner of War Camp. Amazingly, the POW Camp seems to be an accurate model of the society in large!

"After allowance has been made for abnormal circumstances, the social institutions, ideas and habits of groups in the outside world are to be found reflected in a Prisoner of War Camp. It is an unusual but a vital society. "

Read the full article at Economics of POW Camp.

Long Tail Roundup

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 14:33:23 -0800

There has been quite a bit of discussion around the article by Anita Elberse, a professor at Harvard Business School, on the Long Tail theory and its validity: "She focused on the music and home-video industries--two markets that Anderson and others frequently hold up as examples of the long tail in action--reviewing sales data from Nielsen SoundScan, Nielsen VideoScan, the online music service Rhapsody, and the Australian DVD-by-mail service Quickflix. What she found may surprise you: Blockbusters are capturing even more of the market than they used to, and consumers in the tail don't really like niche products much."

I did not post anything here until I got a chance to read the whole article for myself (it's six pages long and can be found at Should You Invest in the Long Tail?) and now that I've read it I think it has some very interesting valid points, although in my opinion it does not invalidate the Long Tail theroy. Like many other things in life, it boils down to interpretations. I think both the Long Tail theory and Elberse's thoughts are important when one is thinking about a market, and they are not contradictory. To understand this better, it's important to read Anderson's response (although it's a bit light), and more importantly a comment posted underneath it by Ali Partovi, founder of iLike. Partovi's observation is very interesting.

Also, Elberse refers to McPhee's Thoey of Exposure in her article, which I think deservers to be noticed and is a great descirption of mass consumer behavior. This is one of the areas where I think Anderon's conclusion on taste for niche products is wrong and Elberse's idea (i.e., McPhee's) is closer to reality in large.

Interactive Linux kernel map

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 19:40:33 -0800

This one is cool! You have to see it for yourself. Welcome to the Interactive Linux kernel map.

Talk by Chad Hurley, YouTube Co-Founder

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 21:55:40 -0800

Jill Bolte Taylor's stroke of insight

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 00:50:07 -0800

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is a Harvard-trained and published neuroanatomist -- she "got a research opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: She had a massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions -- motion, speech, self-awareness -- shut down one by one. An astonishing story."

Here is the video of her TED talk: Jill Bolte Taylor's powerful stroke of insight | Video on TED.com.

The video is currently number one on the list of all time top ten TED talks.

Psychologist Might Outsmart Others in Netflix Prize

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 21:55:21 -0800

"In October 2006, Netflix announced it would give a cool seven figures to whoever created a movie-recommending algorithm 10 percent better than its own. Within two weeks, the DVD rental company had received 169 submissions, including three that were slightly superior to Cinematch, Netflix's recommendation software. After a month, more than a thousand programs had been entered, and the top scorers were almost halfway to the goal."

Because of a past life in algorithmic problem solving I was and have stayed interested in the Netflix prize. In fact it's more than that -- I honestly think their idea on letting others contribute and improve the algorithm was brilliant.

This Wired article is interesting, entertaining, and informative. Read the full article at This Psychologist Might Outsmart the Math Brains Competing for the Netflix Prize.

iSuppli: New iPhone BOM Cost

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 12:11:13 -0800

"At a hardware BOM and manufacturing cost of $173, the new iPhone is significantly less expensive to produce than the first-generation product, despite major improvements in the product's functionality and unique usability, due to the addition of 3G communications... The original 8Gbyte iPhone carried a cost of $226 after component price reductions, giving the new product a 23 percent hardware cost reduction due to component price declines."

Read the full article at iSuppli's Preliminary Study. The image shows the BOM from the iSuppli article. Click on the image for larger version.

A Look Inside Wikipedia's Infrastructure

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:37:38 -0800

Running on less than 300 servers, Wikipedia boasts some huge numbers:

50,000 http requests per second
80,000 SQL queries per second
7 million registered users
18 million page objects in the English version
250 million page links # 220 million revisions
1.5 terabytes of compressed data

Read the full article at A Look Inside Wikipedia's Infrastructure - Data Center Knowledge.

Nokia, Symbian, and the Mobile Landscape

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 13:49:00 -0800

The biggest news today is that Nokia is buying the rest of Symbian and releasing it as open source under Symbian Foundation. Nokia is also planning on a big application ecosystem around symbian focusing on bringing web-based services to the handsets. So things are getting interesting. We now have:

Google/Android/Open Handset Alliance with massive developer support and well, Google's weight behind it, but no handsets yet
Apple/iPhone with impressive and proven "next generation" user experience, fully connected with 3G and GPS coming, a very fast growing user base but not "open"
Nokia/Symbian, not as sexy as Android and certainly iPhone but with a huge huge user base, now going the open route
And LIMO, promising a fully open Linux for mobile platform, but with pretty young anyway you look at it without the carisma of a Steve Jobs that would pull a zero-to-dominate-the-market-in-sixty-seconds.

So the market is interestingly shifting, and obviously regardless of what Android delivers in the end it looks like its existance has caused some really interesting changes in the mobile landscape. Without Android I don't think Nokia would be doing this.

I'm planning to contemplate some more on how this new picture will change the market... UPDATE: Read Om Malik's commentary on the subject. It's good.

Donald Knuth in CACM

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 13:39:35 -0800

Since my university days I have always had very high respect for Donald Knuth. Reading his classic books on algorithms widened my view of programming as I was studying the fundamentals of programming. Communications of ACM has published the first part of an interview with him from March 2007: Communications - July 2008.

15 Entrepreneur Blogs Worth Reading

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 23:20:53 -0800

The Wall Street Journal names some interesting blogs, including Craig Newmark's, in Independent Street : 15 Entrepreneur Blogs Worth Reading.